[Update]: World of Warcraft will soon start connecting low-population servers to more active ones.

If you've been using the auction house in World of Warcraft over the past few weeks, you've likely noticed that it becomes incredibly slow around peak hours. Sometimes the auction house can even get so overwhelmed it simply starts ignoring your inputs, making it so posting even a couple of potions can be a needlessly lengthy and tedious affair.

In order to address this, Blizzard has now essentially given players a 'budget' of auction house actions per minute, all with the intent to put a stop to addons submitting massive amounts of operations over and over again. From what I can tell the number of actions appears to be 25, so if you're a casual user, this shouldn't affect you in any real way.

That said, while I fully understand Blizzard's reasoning behind these changes, I am somewhat worried they might have a negative effect on the health of the auction house as a whole. The current expansion materials will almost certainly remain in a pretty good place as there's a ton of players still using them, but things like battle pets, transmog items, or oldschool crafting materials are likely to suffer.

When it comes to battle pets, for example, selling even the cheapest ones is often a lengthy process. I can take weeks, sometimes even months to get a single piece of gold out of them. And now that you can't post them in large quantities due to the throttling effect, I have a feeling the lower end of the market will simply collapse. Same thing with the cosmetic transmog items - why bother spending a real-life hour posting these items under the new system when they sell so infrequently?

Whatever happens, it'll certainly be interesting to follow as these sort of massive changes to the in-game economy don't come about all too often for World of Warcraft! So while the dust settles, you can read a little bit more about these tweaks over at the WoW forums.